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Barbara Lindsey

Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology | Resources | EDU... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6070

student survey technology

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07 - Cached
  • They are characterized as preferring teamwork, experiential activities, and the use of technology
  • Doing is more important than knowing, and learning is accomplished through trial and error as opposed to a logical and rule-based approach.2 Similarly, Paul Hagner found that these students not only possess the skills necessary to use these new communication forms, but there is an ever increasing expectation on their part that these new communication paths be used
  • Much of the work to date, while interesting and compelling, is intuitive and largely based on qualitative data and observation.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • There is an inexorable trend among college students to universal ownership, mobility, and access to technology.
  • Students were asked about the applications they used on their electronic devices. They reported that they use technology first for educational purposes, followed by communication.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      All self-reported. Would have been powerful if could have actually tracked a representative sample and compared actual use with reported use.
  • presentation software was driven primarily by the requirements of the students' major and the curriculum.
  • Communications and entertainment are very much related to gender and age.
  • From student interviews, a picture emerged of student technology use driven by the demands of the major and the classes that students take. Seniors reported spending more time overall on a computer than do freshmen, and they reported greater use of a computer at a place of employment. Seniors spent more hours on the computer each week in support of their educational activities and also more time on more advanced applications—spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics.
  • Confirming what parents suspect, students with the lowest grade point averages (GPAs) spend significantly more time playing computer games; students with the highest GPAs spend more hours weekly using the computer in support of classroom activities. At the University of Minnesota, Crookston, students spent the most hours on the computer in support of classroom activities. This likely reflects the deliberate design of the curriculum to use a laptop extensively. In summary, the curriculum's technology requirements are major motivators for students to learn to use specialized software.
  • The interviews indicated that students are skilled with basic office suite applications but tend to know just enough technology functionality to accomplish their work; they have less in-depth application knowledge or problem solving skills.
  • According to McEuen, student technology skills can be likened to writing skills: Students come to college knowing how to write, but they are not developed writers. The analogy holds true for information technology, and McEuen suggested that colleges and universities approach information technology in the same way they approach writing.6
  • he major requires the development of higher-level skill sets with particular applications.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      Not really quantitative--self-reported data back by selected qualitative interviews
  • The comparative literature on student IT skill self-assessment suggests that students overrate their skills; freshmen overrate their skills more than seniors, and men overrate their skills more than women.7 Our data supports these conclusions. Judy Doherty, director of the Student Technologies Resource Group at Colgate University, remarked on student skill assessment, "Students state in their job applications that they are good if not very good, but when tested their skills are average to poor, and they need a lot of training."8
  • Mary Jane Smetanka of the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune reported that some students are so conditioned by punch-a-button problem solving on computers that they approach problems with a scattershot impulsiveness instead of methodically working them through. In turn, this leads to problem-solving difficulties.
  • We expected to find that the Net Generation student prefers classes that use technology. What we found instead is a bell curve with a preference for a moderate use of technology in the classroom (see Figure 1).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      More information needs to be given to find out why--may be tool and method not engaging.
  • It is not surprising that if technology is used well by the instructor, students will come to appreciate its benefits.
  • A student's major was also an important predictor of preferences for technology in the classroom (see Table 3), with engineering students having the highest preference for technology in the classroom (67.8 percent), followed by business students (64.3 percent).
  • Humanities 7.7% 47.9% 40.2
  • he highest scores were given to improved communications, followed by factors related to the management of classroom activities. Lower impact activities had to do with comprehension of classroom materials (complex concepts).
  • I spend more time engaged in course activities in those courses that require me to use technology.
  • The instructors' use of technology in my classes has increased my interest in the subject matter. 3.25 Classes that use information technology are more likely to focus on real-world tasks and examples.
  • Interestingly, students do not feel that use of information technology in classes greatly increases the amount of time engaged with course activities (3.22 mean).12 This is in direct contrast to faculty perceptions reported in an earlier study, where 65 percent of faculty reported they perceived that students spend more time engaged with course materials
  • Only 12.7 percent said the most valuable benefit was improved learning; 3.7 percent perceived no benefit whatsoever. Note that students could only select one response, so more than 12.7 percent may have felt learning was improved, but it was not ranked highest. These findings compare favorably with a study done by Douglas Havelka at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, who identified the top six benefits of the current implementation of IT as improving work efficiency, affecting the way people behave, improving communications, making life more convenient, saving time, and improving learning ability.14
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      Would have been good to know exactly what kinds of technologies were meant here.
  • Our data suggest that we are at best at the cusp of technologies being employed to improve learning.
  • The interactive features least used by faculty were the features that students indicated contributed the most to their learning.
  • he students in this study called our attention to performance by noting an uneven diffusion of innovation using this technology. This may be due, in part, to faculty or student skill. It may also be due to a lack of institutional recognition of innovation, especially as the successful use of course management systems affects or does not affect faculty tenure, promotion, and merit decisions
  • we found that many of the students most skilled in the use of technology had mixed feelings about technology in the classroom.
  • What we found was that many necessary skills had to be learned at the college or university and that the motivation for doing so was very much tied to the requirements of the curriculum. Similarly, the students in our survey had not gained the necessary skills to use technology in support of academic work outside the classroom. We found a significant need for further training in the use of information technology in support of learning and problem-solving skills.
  • Course management systems were used most by both faculty and students for communication of information and administrative activities and much less in support of learning.
  • In 1997, Michael Hooker proclaimed, "higher education is on the brink of a revolution." Hooker went on to note that two of the greatest challenges our institutions face are those of "harnessing the power of digital technology and responding to the information revolution."18 Hooker and many others, however, did not anticipate the likelihood that higher education's learning revolution would be a journey of a thousand miles rather than a discrete event. Indeed, a study of learning's last great revolution—the invention of moveable type—reveals, too, a revolution conducted over centuries leading to the emergence of a publishing industry, intellectual property rights law, the augmentation of customized lectures with textbooks, and so forth.
  • Both the ECAR study on faculty use of course management systems and this study of student experiences with information technology concluded that, while information technology is indeed making important inroads into classroom and learning activities, to date the effects are largely in the convenience of postsecondary teaching and learning and do not yet constitute a "learning revolution." This should not surprise us. The invention of moveable type enhanced, nearly immediately, access to published information and reduced the time needed to produce new publications. This invention did not itself change literacy levels, teaching styles, learning styles, or other key markers of a learning revolution. These changes, while catalyzed by the new technology, depended on slower social changes to institutions. I believe that is what we are witnessing in higher education today.
  • The institutions chosen represent a nonrepresentative mix of the different types of higher education institution in the United States, in terms of Carnegie class as well as location, source of funding, and levels of technology emphasis. Note, however, that we consider our findings to be instructive rather than conclusive of student experiences at different types of Carnegie institutions.
  • Qualitative data were collected by means of focus groups and individual interviews. We interviewed undergraduate students, administrators, and individuals identified as experts in the field of student technology use in the classroom. Student focus groups and interviews of administrators were conducted at six of the thirteen schools participating in the study.
Barbara Lindsey

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration - 0 views

www.capetowndeclaration.org/faq

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 08 - Cached
  • The Internet provides a platform for collaborative learning and knowledge creation across long distances, which is central to the long term promise of open education. It also offers a channel for the creation and distribution of knowledge from a diversity of places and cultures around the world, and not just from major publishing centres like New York, London, and Paris.
  • we believe that open education and open educational resources are very much compatible with the business of commercial publishing. The Declaration clearly states that the open education movement should "...engage entrepreneurs and publishers who are developing innovative business models that are both open and financially sustainable."
  • here is likely to be some upheaval in formal educational systems as teachers and students engage in the new pedagogies that are enabled by openness. There might also be concerns that some of the deeper goals of the open education movement could backfire. For example, instead of enhancing locally relevant educational practices and rewarding those with regional expertise, it is possible that a flood of foreign-produced open educational resources will actually undermine the capacity for regional expertise to form or thrive.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • First, this is not actually a philanthropic endeavor in the classic sense of "donating" something to those with less. Instead, the open education movement promotes conditions for self-empowerment, and one of the central premises of the movement focuses on the freedom to be educated in the manner of one's choosing. Second, the permissions granted in defining an open educational resource explicitly enable the localization and adaptation of materials to be more locally appropriate. Every person should have the right to be educated in his/her native language, and in a manner that is most suitable to the personal and cultural contexts in which they reside. Third, we have good reason to believe that the contributions to the global open educational enterprise from those in resource-limited settings are at least as valuable as contributions from anyone else. While we have much to do to enable truly equitably participation among all of the citizens of the globe, there is widespread agreement that the ultimate goal is some type of open educational network, not a unidirectional pipeline.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 08
       
      Key component of a critical pedagogical approach.
  • educational resources commissioned and paid for directly by the public sector should be released as open educational resources. This ensures that the taxpayers who financed these resources can benefit from them fully. Of course, this principle cannot extend to resources paid for indirectly with public funds, such as materials written by professors at public universities. The Declaration does strongly encourage these professors and institutions to make all of their resources open. However, in the end, this is their choice.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 08
       
      Wow! Wonder how many critical pedagogists would embrace this idea.
  • resources should be licensed to facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone
  • many of the participants advocated for inclusion of language that indicates that the license should ideally impose no legal constraints other than a requirement by the creator for appropriate attribution or the sharing of derivative works. This degree of openness represents the 'gold standard' in open educational resource licensing. However, it is also recognized that some authors and publishers may wish to disallow commercial uses (non-commercial). Resources licensed with this additional restriction are still open educational resources, but do come with risks and costs.
  • we suggest that you use one of the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, for several reasons: The licenses have human-readable deeds, which is (generally) easier for people to understand.The licenses have a computer-readable component which enables search and filtering by license status, an increasingly important consideration in an era of exploding online content.The licenses have been ported to many countries around the world, with more being added every year, which guarantees their worldwide application and enforcement.The licenses are already the most frequently used licenses for open educational resources, which will make it easier for users to learn about their rights, as well as use the materials in interesting ways.
  • If an author's primary purpose in creating open educational resources is for it to be used as widely, freely, and creatively as possible, then using CC-BY is the better choice
  • n most cases, the NC term is likely to have undesired repercussions for your work. If you are thinking of restricting commercial activity, ask yourself the following questions: What is the goal of doing so? Is it that the creators wish to make money from their contributions? Is this likely? Is it assumed that all for-profit activity is somehow inimical to education? What are the costs of restricting commercial use of open educational resources and do you wish to incur them? For example, is it your goal to forbid a for-profit publisher in a developing country from printing copies of your materials and distributing them there?
  • Open educational resources licensed using CC-BY have no restrictions on use beyond attribution for the original creator. Open educational resources licensed using CC-BY-SA also require attribution, but have the additional restriction of requiring that the derived material be licensed in the same manner as the original(s), thus ensuring their continued availability as open educational resources.
  • CC-BY allows for a variety of motivations, including the possibility of commercial success, to drive users to adapt and re-purpose their materials.
  • f an author's primary purpose in creating open educational resources is for that material to never leave the educational commons, such as it is, then you may want to apply the SA term. In this case, the possibilities for viable commercial derivatives, though not disallowed, are diminished, and so users motivated to adapt materials for that purpose are unlikely to participate. In addition, open educational resources licensed with an SA term are only interoperable with other SA materials, which seriously limits their capacity for re-mixing.
  • There are two key points we would ask you to consider prior to applying the ND term. First, are you willing to prevent all of the wonderful ways in which your work might be improved upon just for the sake of preventing a few derivatives that you would consider inferior? It is worth remembering that it is the granting of freedoms to share, reprint, translate, combine, or adapt that makes open educational resources educationally different from those that can merely be read online for free.
  • you must remember that digital resources are not consumable goods, in the sense that they can be shared infinitely without any loss of value for the original. As such, if inferior derivatives are created, those creations have done nothing to diminish the quality of your original work, which will remain available for others to use or improve upon as they wish.
  • there is absolutely no restriction on use of public domain materials. In addition to being able to freely use such materials, you are free to adapt public domain materials and then license the derivative works in any way you choose, including standard all-rights-reserved copyright. You have to apply an open license if you want your contribution to add to the pool of open educational resources.
Barbara Lindsey

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...45823

collaboration educause learning2.0 pedagogy beyondwebct

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jul 08 - Cached
  • But at the same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become “spikier”: the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness.2
  • various initiatives launched over the past few years have created a series of building blocks that could provide the means for transforming the ways in which we provide education and support learning. Much of this activity has been enabled and inspired by the growth and evolution of the Internet, which has created a global “platform” that has vastly expanded access to all sorts of resources, including formal and informal educational materials. The Internet has also fostered a new culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.
  • the most visible impact of the Internet on education to date has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them. The movement began in 2001 when the William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly funded MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which today provides open access to undergraduate- and graduate-level materials and modules from more than 1,700 courses (covering virtually all of MIT’s curriculum). MIT’s initiative has inspired hundreds of other colleges and universities in the United States and abroad to join the movement and contribute their own open educational resources.4 The Internet has also been used to provide students with direct access to high-quality (and therefore scarce and expensive) tools like telescopes, scanning electron microscopes, and supercomputer simulation models, allowing students to engage personally in research.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5
  • This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated. This perspective also helps to explain the effectiveness of study groups. Students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding (one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others).
  • This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
  • ecoming a trusted contributor to Wikipedia involves a process of legitimate peripheral participation that is similar to the process in open source software communities. Any reader can modify the text of an entry or contribute new entries. But only more experienced and more trusted individuals are invited to become “administrators” who have access to higher-level editing tools.8
  • by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.
  • But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field.
  • Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice.
  • Another interesting experiment in Second Life was the Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School fall 2006 course called “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion.” The course was offered at three levels of participation. First, students enrolled in Harvard Law School were able to attend the class in person. Second, non–law school students could enroll in the class through the Harvard Extension School and could attend lectures, participate in discussions, and interact with faculty members during their office hours within Second Life. And at the third level, any participant in Second Life could review the lectures and other course materials online at no cost. This experiment suggests one way that the social life of Internet-based virtual education can coexist with and extend traditional education.
  • Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India. The project is described by its developers as “the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa.”11 Lectures from model teachers are recorded on video and are then physically distributed via DVD to schools that typically lack well-trained instructors (as well as Internet connections). While the lectures are being played on a monitor (which is often powered by a battery, since many participating schools also lack reliable electricity), a “mediator,” who could be a local teacher or simply a bright student, periodically pauses the video and encourages engagement among the students by asking questions or initiating discussions about the material they are watching.
  • John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan
  • For the past few years, he points out, incoming students have been bringing along their online social networks, allowing them to stay in touch with their old friends and former classmates through tools like SMS, IM, Facebook, and MySpace. Through these continuing connections, the University of Michigan students can extend the discussions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campus to include their broader networks. Even though these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, they amplify the impact that the university is having while also benefiting students on campus.14 If King is right, it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.
  • The project’s website includes reports of how students, under the guidance of professional astronomers, are using the Faulkes telescopes to make small but meaningful contributions to astronomy.
  • “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
  • HOU invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists
  • The site is intended to serve as “an open forum for worldwide discussions on the Decameron and related topics.” Both scholars and students are invited to submit their own contributions as well as to access the existing resources on the site. The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field.
  • I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another's writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other's writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community's discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.17
  • for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.
  • Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.
  • We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
  • An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/) launched earlier this year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
  • The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”20
  • The original World Wide Web—the “Web 1.0” that emerged in the mid-1990s—vastly expanded access to information. The Open Educational Resources movement is an example of the impact that the Web 1.0 has had on education.
  • But the Web 2.0, which has emerged in just the past few years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.
  • In the twentieth century, the dominant approach to education focused on helping students to build stocks of knowledge and cognitive skills that could be deployed later in appropriate situations. This approach to education worked well in a relatively stable, slowly changing world in which careers typically lasted a lifetime. But the twenty-first century is quite different.
  • We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.
  • The demand-pull approach is based on providing students with access to rich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice. It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something. Often the learning that transpires is informal rather than formally conducted in a structured setting. Learning occurs in part through a form of reflective practicum, but in this case the reflection comes from being embedded in a community of practice that may be supported by both a physical and a virtual presence and by collaboration between newcomers and professional practitioners/scholars.
  • The building blocks provided by the OER movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems23 that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.
  • As a graduate student at UC-Berkeley in the late 1970s, Treisman worked on the poor performance of African-Americans and Latinos in undergraduate calculus classes. He discovered the problem was not these students’ lack of motivation or inadequate preparation but rather their approach to studying. In contrast to Asian students, who, Treisman found, naturally formed “academic communities” in which they studied and learned together, African-Americans tended to separate their academic and social lives and studied completely on their own. Treisman developed a program that engaged these students in workshop-style study groups in which they collaborated on solving particularly challenging calculus problems. The program was so successful that it was adopted by many other colleges. See Uri Treisman, “Studying Students Studying Calculus: A Look at the Lives of Minority Mathematics Students in College,” College Mathematics Journal, vol. 23, no. 5 (November 1992), pp. 362–72, http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu/workshops/treisman.html.
  • In the early 1970s, Stanford University Professor James Gibbons developed a similar technique, which he called Tutored Videotape Instruction (TVI). Like DSH, TVI was based on showing recorded classroom lectures to groups of students, accompanied by a “tutor” whose job was to stop the tape periodically and ask questions. Evaluations of TVI showed that students’ learning from TVI was as good as or better than in-classroom learning and that the weakest students academically learned more from participating in TVI instruction than from attending lectures in person. See J. F. Gibbons, W. R. Kincheloe, and S. K. Down, “Tutored Video-tape Instruction: A New Use of Electronics Media in Education,” Science, vol. 195 (1977), pp. 1136–49.
Barbara Lindsey

Deliberate Engagement of Laptops in Large Lecture Classes to Improve Attentiveness and ... - 0 views

www.lecturetools.com/...Deliberate_Engagement.pdf

laptops classroom large engagement learning2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 29 Jan 11
     
    The value of in-class Internet technologies to student attentiveness, engagement, and learning remains both controversial and filled with promising potential. In this study, students were given the option to use LectureTools, an interactive suite of tools designed specifically for larger classes. The availability of these tools dramatically changed the mechanics of the course as over 90% of students attending lecture voluntarily brought their laptops to class. On one hand, surveys over multiple semesters show that students believe the availability of a laptop is more likely to increase their time on tasks unrelated to the conduct of the course. On the other hand, the surveys also ascertained that students felt more attentive with the technology, significantly more engaged, and able to learn more with the technology than in similar classes without it. LectureTools also led to a dramatic increase in the number of students posing questions during class time, with more than half posing at least one question during class over the course of a semester, a percentage far higher than achieved in semesters prior to the use of this technology. These results suggest that while having laptops in the classroom can be a distraction to students, students of today show confidence that they are capable of productive multitasking, showing that they not only can handle this technology when applied through "deliberate engagement" using tools like LectureTools, but thrive with it, as seen through improved attentiveness, learning, and overall engagement even in larger classes.
Barbara Lindsey

Stanford faculty collaborate to improve online education - 0 views

news.stanford.edu/...-online-courseware-062811.html

stanford faculty online education education2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 14 Feb 12
     
    Fall 2012 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

Presentation Zen Bento Box - dr. jude rathburn's posterous - 0 views

4edtechies.posterous.com/presentation-zen-bento-box

presentationzen presentationtools assessmentforlearning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Take an hour to show Garr's award winning Presentation Zen video (included in the bento box) so that people can see the principles in action before trying to design their own presentations. 
  • since viewers are not familiar with the approach, I found it is helpful to take some time to discuss each element.
  • rovide risk-free (i.e. low stakes) opportunities for learners to practice various elements of the Presentation Zen approach, share the results and provide peer reviews.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In my senior level strategic management seminar I asked people to break up into groups of three and then distributed a Fortune article about a local firm so that we would all be working with the same course-related content.  I gave them class time to read the article and also provided an organizing framework to help them focus on the main themes regarding the company's business strategy.  I also printed out a blank storyboard using the 3-slide handout feature in MSPowerPoint and distributed a few copies to each group.  Their task was to come to some consensus about the most interesting aspect of the company's strategy and identify the one central point that they wanted to get across in their 2-3 minute presentation.  The only other constraints were that they had to include one slide that highlighted some data that supported their central point and they had to create their storyboard and script in analog form before they opened their laptops. 
  • I asked each group to create a narrated presentation using either Keynote or PowerPoint, which they then uploaded to a discussion forum in our web-based course management system.  Each student also reviewed at least one other group's presentation, providing feedback on content, as well as the application of the Presentation Zen approach.  I provided feedback in the forum as well, commenting on the presentations themselves and the peer reviews.  Everyone who participated got full credit, which is why I referred to the practice presentation and peer review as a risk-free or low stakes activity.
  • Provide an example of a presentation that used the Presentation Zen approach, along with the storyboard and script
  • It also opens the door for viewers to give me feedback on the effectiveness of the design decisions I made and offer suggestions on how to improve my presentation.  I have found that opening up the conversation and giving students permission to review my work helps to strengthen our connection and improves my practice at the same time.  It also helps me demonstrate that it takes time and practice to implement the PZ approach - we are all a work in progress!
  • My final tip, at least for now, is to give people plenty of opportunities to practice using the Presentation Zen approach and give and receive feedback.  My students decided they wanted to create at least four presentations throughout the course to demonstrate their understanding of course concepts and their ability to apply those concepts to real world examples. 
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 10
     
    Talks about using Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen approach to designing presentations and how he structures his students' (and his) learning experiences in using this approach.
Barbara Lindsey

Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07mind.html

research learning student2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10
     
    In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.
Barbara Lindsey

YouTube - Sintel - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

opensource film video

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 05 Oct 10
     
    "Sintel" is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film. This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.
Barbara Lindsey

The Eight-Year Study Project - 0 views

www.8yearstudy.org/projectintro.html

study experimental testing assessment 1930s university assessmentforlearning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 04 Oct 10
     
    The Eight Year Study, considered by many educational researchers to be one of the best program evaluation studies ever conducted, followed the students from more than 30 experimental high schools during the 1930's. Although the students from the experimental schools only did as well or slightly better on standardized test scores than students from their traditional counterparts, the students from the experimental schools showed many improvements in other areas.
Barbara Lindsey

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration - 0 views

www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 08 - Cached
  • hey are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.
  • It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.
  • They contribute to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.
  • Most educators remain unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources.
  • he majority of the world does not yet have access to the computers and networks that are integral to most current open education efforts.
  • ree strategies to increase the reach and impact of open educational resources
  • we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement.
  • Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.
  • elease their resources openly.
  • Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.
  • governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.
  • These strategies represent more than just the right thing to do. They constitute a wise investment in teaching and learning for the 21st century. They will make it possible to redirect funds from expensive textbooks towards better learning. They will help teachers excel in their work and provide new opportunities for visibility and global impact. They will accelerate innovation in teaching. They will give more control over learning to the learners themselves.
  • We have a chance to nurture a new generation of learners who engage with open educational materials, are empowered by their learning and share their new knowledge and insights with others.
  • we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world through freely available, high-quality, locally relevant educational and learning opportunities.
Barbara Lindsey

Wordle - What is the title of this History Essay? - 0 views

www.wordle.net/...he_title_of_this_History_Essay

wordle essays students example

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  • Barbara Lindsey on 15 Apr 10
     
    Russel Tarr's shows how students using wordle can help each other improve their essay writing skills.
Barbara Lindsey

Higher Education Reimagined With Online Courseware - Education Life - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18open-t.html

education higher online courses

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • M.I.T. officials like to tell about an unsolicited comment they received one day about the online course “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry.” “I learned a LOT from these lectures and the other course material,” the comment said. “Thank you for having it online.” The officials did a double take. It was from Bill Gates. (Really.)
  • But just 9 percent of those who use M.I.T. OpenCourseWare are educators. Forty-two percent are students enrolled at other institutions, while another 43 percent are independent learners like Mr. Gates. Yale, which began putting free courses online just four years ago, is seeing similar proportions: 25 percent are students, a majority of them enrolled at Yale or prospective students; just 6 percent are educators; and 69 percent are independent learners.
  • Professor Shankar is working on his second semester of recorded videos, and says that the experience has improved his teaching.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • So Professor Shankar has begun inserting links to specific portions of Professor Lewin’s course, and, “since any mistake would affect larger numbers of students listening online,” he says, he thinks harder about every topic he teaches in the classroom.
  • His intense, animated ruminations — the title of his course is “Death” — have brought fan mail from Mexico, Iraq, Korea and China. Several months ago, he got a response from somebody suffering from a brain injury and who was using the lectures to exercise his mind. “I don’t think anyone knows what this will do to education 15 years from now,” Professor Kagan says. “But even if it does nothing more than that, that’s enough.”
  • The backers of free courseware acknowledge the benefit of self-enrichment. Still, they say they expect open education not only to expand access to information but also to lead to success in higher education, particularly among low-income students and those who are first in their family to go to college.
  • Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative is working with teams of faculty members, researchers on learning and software engineers to develop e-courses designed to improve the educational experience.
  • Carnegie Mellon is working with community colleges to build four more courses, with the three-year goal of 25 percent more students passing when the class is bolstered by the online instruction.
  • The intended user is the beginning college student, whom Dr. Smith describes as “someone with limited prior knowledge in a college subject and with little or no experience in successfully directing his or her own learning.”
  • . “We now have the technology that enables us to go back to what we all know is the best educational experience: personalized, interactive engagement,” Dr. Smith says.
  • That won’t happen, and in the terms-of-use section of Open Yale Courses, the university makes that clear. Besides not granting degrees or certificates, open courses do not offer direct access to faculty. They, in other words, are strictly “for those who wish to learn,” as the Web site says. “Its purpose is not to duplicate a Yale education.”
  • Open courseware is a classic example of disruptive technology, which, loosely defined, is an innovation that comes along one day to change a product or service, often standing an industry on its head. Craigslist did this to newspapers by posting classified ads for free. And the music industry got blindsided when iTunes started unbundling songs from albums and selling them for 99 cents apiece.
  • Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?
  • P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.
  • David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, is an adviser to P2PU. For the past several years, he has been referring to “the disaggregation of higher education,” the breaking apart of university functions. Dr. Wiley says that models like P2PU address an important component missing from open courseware: human support. That is, when you have a question, whom can you ask? “No one gets all the way through a textbook without a dozen questions,” he says. “Who’s the T.A.? Where’s your study group?” “If you go to M.I.T. OpenCourseWare, there’s no way to find out who else is studying the same material and ask them for help,” he says. At P2PU, a “course organizer” leads the discussion but “you are working together with others, so when you have a question you can ask any of your peers. The core idea of P2PU is putting people together around these open courses.”
  • Mr. Reshef’s plan is to “take anyone, anyone whatsoever,” as long as they can pass an English orientation course and a course in basic computer skills, and have a high school diploma or equivalent. The nonprofit venture has accepted, and enrolled, 380 of 3,000 applicants, and is trying to raise funds through microphilanthropy — “$80 will send one student to UoPeople for a term” — through social networking.
  • Mr. Reshef has used $1 million of his own money to start the University of the People, which taps open courses that other universities have put online and relies on student interaction to guide learning; students even grade one another’s papers.
Barbara Lindsey

YouTube launches support for CC BY and a CC library featuring 10,000 videos - 0 views

creativecommons.org/...27533

cc ccllicense youtube mashup

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 09 Jun 11
     
    Key is how they have improved the video editor function to allow for easy search, integration and mashup of cc-licensed videos.
Barbara Lindsey

Elev8ed - 0 views

elev8ed.org

education students hargadon learning2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 28 Mar 11
     
    Your Voice. Changing Education! A site for students to submit videos that offer new ideas for what education could be and/or inspire others to transform education or propose specific actions to take to improve education in one's community.
Barbara Lindsey

Online Learning is so last year… | 21st Century Collaborative - 0 views

www.21stcenturycollaborative.com/...nline-learning-is-so-last-year

cop communitiesofpractice nussbaum collaboration learning actfl11

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • are people confusing talking to people online with deep, connected learning? Does being part of a social networking site or a NING community mean you are going deep- growing  in your ability to co-construct or deconstruct knowledge? Does it mean you are collaborating if you post, reply to a post, Tweet, or engage in a #edchat conversation? Are we moving toward an acceptance of superficiality as a replacement for deep learning? Has our multiple choice  culture trained our brains to believe that innovation is the holy grail?
  • If all I do is network I do not shift or grow because I am missing the opportunity to go deep and actually learn by doing. It takes both: Networks and Community. Online, global communities of practice and f2f learning communities in my local context.
  • Imagine the deep learning that can be produced when we come together in learning communities and do some of the following (below).
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  • Action Research Groups: Active research done by communities of practice focused on improvement around a possibility or problem in a classroom, school, district, or province.
  • Community of Practice (CoP): A CoP is group of professionals with shared interests and challenges who make a commitment to improve or get better at something over time by sharing ideas, finding solutions, and creating innovations. This requires new dispositions and values such as resisting the urge to quit prematurely.
  • Book Study Groups: PLPeeps, often in cross cohort groups, come together to read and discuss a book collectively in an online space
  • Connected Coaching: individuals on teams are assigned a connected coach who  discusses and shares teaching practices as a means of promoting collegiality and support and to help educators think about how the new literacies inform current teaching practices.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Apr 11
       
      Could you see this for your own ongoing practice and to implement in your own cops in the future?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Apr 11
       
      Could this form the foundation for the advanced course in BWCT?
  • Instructional Rounds:
  • Curriculum Review or Mapping Groups:
  • Critical Friends Groups (CFG):
  • Professional Learning Communities (PLC):
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Apr 11
       
      Would this be something to implement while a TA to be able to document in a portfolio & bring to a job interview?
  • Personal Learning Network (PLN):
Barbara Lindsey

Syntax Untangler | University of Wisconsin-Madison - 1 views

courses.dcs.wisc.edu/untangler

free reading skills practice create

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 15 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 15 Oct 11
     
    Syntax Untangler is an online activity that asks the learner to visually mark up a short primary text in any language, in order to improve small-scale reading skills. Any instructor can easily create and publish their own Syntax Untangler content (go to the Instructor Tools link below).
Barbara Lindsey

If San Francisco Crime were Elevation | Doug McCune - 0 views

dougmccune.com/...-francisco-crime-was-elevation

datamining maps visual graphic

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Really nice. Be great to see the two combined – heatmaps and topography or atleast some kind of colour banding added to the topography. That would open up all kinds of possibilities – you could slice horizontally along the bands and create layers of different ranges. In fact mixing colour and topography would also give you a way of showing two sets of data concurrently – topography for prostitution and some kind of colour banding for wealth for example.
  • Makes the numbers come alive. G
  • Brilliant work! Can you cross this data with the physical typography? I’ve always been curious if safer neighborhoods are uphill.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • It would be interesting to pull the data in from previous decades and see how the elevation has changed in different areas.
  • @adrian – it’s just raw totals, grouped geographically. These aren’t scientific by any means, I basically took the underlying pattern and extruded it out and smoothed it a bit to make it look “pretty”. But basically each image is the aggregate numbers for a single year of crime data.
  • @richard – yes, there is some smoothing in effect, which means that the ridge along Shotwell St (for the prostitution map) is indeed a bit smoothed between peaks. That’s not to say that there are only two peaks at Shotwell and 19th and Shotwell and 17th. There are incidents in between as well, but the big peaks at those major intersections does mean that the ridge between them appears higher than the actual incidents along those blocks support. A lot of people have commented on the usefulness of maps like these. I want to stress once again: this was done as an art project much more than a useful visualization. My goal was not to provide useful information that one could act on.
  • “one trick pony. these maps add nothing of value to a standard color plot.” I disagree: allowing for a third dimension of elevation makes the reality of concentration clearer – and half the point of crime mapping is to measure concentration, not simply “intensity.”
  • Great idea and nice work on the graphics, but there are at least three improvements you should make to reveal *true* patterns. Forgive me if you already did these. 1) Availability bias – normalize for population density (i.e. per capita activity) 2) Sampling bias – normalize for the number of cops on the beat (geographic and crime type) 2) Frame bias – break it up by daytime and night time
  • Barbara Lindsey on 09 Jun 10
     
    Visual representation of various crime stats from San Francisco
Barbara Lindsey

SpeEdChange: Considering Universal Design - 0 views

speedchange.blogspot.com/...sidering-universal-design.html

UDL universal design socol

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Jun 10 - Cached
  • UDL means many things, depending on which group of researchers and advocates you are speaking to, but the general idea is to create learning environment which can be individually adapted to learner needs. In other words, the environment adapts rather than forcing the learner to.
  • educational institutions, content delivery systems, assessment systems, and ICT should be flexible enough to meet the diverse needs of the learner population.
  • And school ends in graduate school with them telling you that you are making your citations wrong - not that they can't tell where you got your information from, you're just not conforming absolutely to whichever nonsensical citation system your particular department has chosen to embrace."
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      Do you see any problems with either conforming to or not conforming to an agreed upon citation system? What is Socol's argument here? Is this a good example for his argument? 
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • A decade ago the Centre for Applied Special Technology (CAST) proposed 3 principles that could be applied to the curriculum and set an agenda for inclusion, as follows:1. Provide multiple representations of content.2. Provide multiple options for expression and control.3. Provide multiple options for engagement and motivation.and these remain essential, but I want to add a fourth which must apply to them all:4. That these representations and options be available to all students on the basis of understood needs and/or informed preference, without the need for diagnosis.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      To what extent have you experienced this in the courses you've taken? Would offering this to your students be helpful to them? Would it change the way you assess? Would this change the way a course is taught? How a program is structured? Do you see any problems with this?
  • This is not just privileging one media form over another, this is elevating the "how" over the "what" to an extreme extent. It not only humiliates those labelled with "disabilities," it refuses to accommodate the very legitimate choices of all students. Choices which might significantly improve the comfort, attention capabilities, and learning opportunities for that 60%-65% who currently fall far behind, and might even help those already doing well to achieve their full potential.
  • Under UDL content would be fully flexible in delivery.
  • UDL should really go further - especially in recognizing that not all students benefit from following the same path to skills and knowledge. Any system which applies the same pedagogy to all students is clearly not a universal design (in my mind it is not even moral). Insisting on everyone using the same textbook, or doing the exact same assignments, or following the same schedule - those are all industrial practices which are based in the belief that students are a raw material which can be shaped by repeated stampings. Any claims to some kind of rational meritocracy within that "same requirements" argument are simply a mask for the essential anti-humaness of the system.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      Would love to hear your thought on this assertion by Socol. If you agree with what he says, how would/could you structure the courses you teach? How could the courses you are taking as a student change? Would that help you? Could these courses then attract more diverse students? What would the learning look like? The assessments?
  • "Create something," he told us, "which demonstrates your in-depth knowledge of at least one critical moment in that century."
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      How would you design an assessment around this?
  • I am not imparting malice to their position, simply suggesting that there is little incentive - emotionally, psychologically, or economically - for them to change.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      Do you think this is true?
  • I think that teacher training institutions should be required to have at least a third of their teaching and research faculty consist of individuals who have special needs, or who needed alternative educations, or who simply did badly in school.
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